New &
Forthcoming Bird Books - A chronological list of
the most important world bird books published since 2007 or scheduled to
be released in the next few years. Please submit any additions or
corrections.

Gurney's Pitta Pitta gurneyi
down to
one bird in Thailand, thanks to no protection of habitat or
birds after rediscovery in 1986. All habitat in Burma to be
cleared soon for oil palm plantations.

Spix's Macaw reappears at Curaçá, BA, Brazil

Sixteen years after the last known wild Spix's Macaw
Cyanopsitta spixii was last
observed in degraded forest east of Curaçá, Bahia, Brazil, a
Spix's Macaw has again been seen in the vicinity, with
identification confirmed by a video and audio recording.
BirdLife, 24 June 2016. The origin of the bird is unknown,
with speculation that it may be a released captive bird, or the
bird seen throughout the 1990s that disappeared in 2000 (which
would be my bet).

I went to see the last known bird in 1994 with Dave Sargeant
and Rod McCann. We were fortunate that IBAMA gave us a permit to
go look for the bird, and that Marco da Ré, who was in
charge of the Spix's conservation project, was able to locate
the bird for us on the third day of searching for it. Habitat
restoration projects were well underway at Curaçá, including
anti-goat fencing and the planting of native trees. Because of
incredible goat overgrazing, unfenced seedlings rarely survived. By now, the
habitat must be significantly better in places where goats have
been excluded.

If IBAMA will give you a permit to look for the
bird now being observed, the people of Curaçá and the hotel and
restaurant undoubtedly will be thrilled once again to welcome birders to the
pleasant town near the Rio São Francisco. At the praça on Friday
night, Marco introduced us the "cowboys of the Spix's Macaw".

This may be the world's most desirable bird to observe in the
wild, and it should be twitchable without causing disturbance.
If you don't speak Portuguese, start studying NOW. The Pimsleur
course of 90 lessons is an excellent place to begin. You
probably will need to write to IBAMA in Portuguese for
permission to look for the Spix's, and you will need to speak
Portuguese to get around easily in Brazil.

Unless you are
extremely lucky, you will need expert help finding the bird. The
region is criss-crossed by unmarked dirt roads, some of which
require a high-clearance vehicle.

WCS Big Four Annual Compensation Would Buy 27,000 acres of
Wilderness

The
2014 Form 990 (page 55 of 203) filed by the Wildlife
Conservation Society (WCS) discloses that the four most highly
paid executives made a total of $3,525,907 in the tax year
ending June 30, 2015, with the top two (Cristian Samper and John
G. Robinson) receiving more than $1 million each. The
World Land Trust website reports that they are able to buy wilderness
land in Latin America for approximately
£100 [$130] per acre. At that rate, the WCS Big Four salaries
for one year would buy 27,122 acres (110 km2) of wilderness.

July 3, 2016 - The paper field
guide is obsolete.

I have seen the future of the bird field guide, and it is not
a book. It is the Kindle version
of Birds of Western Ecuador, A Photographic Guide, by
Nick Athamas and Paul
Greenfield (Princeton University Press 2016). This is a landmark
in the ongoing changeover from heavy, paper field guides to
digital guides read in the field on tablets and other portable
devices. This guide's only
weakness is its lack of painted color plates,
but the photographs are mostly very good to excellent, and a new
Birds of Ecuador illustrated by Robin Restall is scheduled for release
later this year.

Technical Advice

At home, I find it preferable to read the digital guide in landscape
mode on my desktop computer. The text can be blown up to
150%, but that requires a lot of vertical scrolling. For full-page viewing, you will
need a monitor support that easily pivots from landscape
(horizontal) mode to portrait (vertical) mode. I use and highly
recommend the Vivo STAND-V001B gas spring monitor arm clamped to a
slide-out tray on my desk. My other monitor (a Dell) is on the
included stand that pivots, though not easily.

Simply open the field guide in Kindle, then in Change Display
Settings, change the Orientation of your monitor from Landscape
to Portrait (flipped). Select Fit to Width from the zoom
dropdown, then type in a slightly higher percentage (from 89% to
93% on my setup) to increase type size without losing content.
Then select View>>Full Screen to replace the top nav with
bottom nav that includes forward & back buttons.

For travel and field use, until folding or expanding tablets become
available, ten-inch tablets offer the best compromise between
screen size and portability. At this time, the fantastic display
with
DCI-P3 color gamut and "True Tone" on
the Apple iPad Pro 9.7 is clearly superior to anything
else available. I prefer the open, non-proprietary Android
platform, but Samsung, the leading Android tablet producer, now offers nothing
comparable to the display on the iPad Pro 9.7.

I bought the 256
GB version, which has enough storage capacity to take all the
available reference works on any bird trip. (Speaking of
reference works, Princeton University Press has released the new
Birds of New Guinea handbook (supplementing
the second edition of superb field guide) by Bruce Beehler &
Thane Pratt on Kindle, so you can easily take this heavy
reference with you on treks on the steep, slippery trails in the
New Guinea highlands -- no scanning necessary.)

Field Guide Usability

The format of Birds of Western Ecuador offers
excellent usability. Each page of text includes about four to
six species accounts, with range maps in the left margin. Color
photographs are on the next page. In many instances,
illustrations of the last species on a text page are placed at
the bottom of the text page. Thus, the illustration of a bird is
only a click and/or scroll from its text.

The text font is Times New Roman, a popular book font but not
ideal for digital viewing. A sans serif font such as Arial or
Verdana would have been a better choice. As digital overtakes
print, publishers should scrap the old conventions of paper
publishing and choose what works best on a color screen.

Species headings are bold white text on brownish backgrounds,
with a darker background for the species numbers. I endorse the
practice of starting species numbers on each page at 1, since
digital viewers are unlikely to become confused, and pages can't
stick together. Also, single digits occupy less space on the
plates than two or three digit species numbers.

Missing Species

If you can't find a bird in the species accounts, don't
panic. Simply jump to Appendix I: Species Not Included, starting
at page 425. I was shocked that the extent of deforestation and
seafood factory farming have reached a point that Boat-billed Heron, Agami Heron, Harpy Eagle, and White-crowned Manakin are on the
list of Extirpated and Possibly Extirpated Species and likely
gone from the Pacific Slope of Ecuador.

Species Accounts

Due to space limitations, the species accounts provide
essential information for field identification but not much
more. Some useful site suggestions are included, such as
Pale-breasted Tinamou and Ochre-bellied Dove occasionally
visiting feeders at Jorupe Reserve. Since any bird book can be
scanned and loaded into a tablet, most birders are likely to
have additional resources available in their devices, though not
in an easily usable format.

As an example of helpful, distinguishing details, see the
Double-banded Graytail account (p. 228): "Gray-mantled Wren (p. 332),
which can occur with it in forest canopy, lacks the superciliary
and wing bars, and has a barred tail (usually the key feature
when looking up at the bird from far below). Behavior also
differs: Gray-mantled Wren tends to creep along branches, while
Double-banded Graytail clings to leaves, gleaning insects from
them."

Photographs of Note

I had forgotten how closely immature Black-and-Chestnut Eagle
resembles Crested Eagle until seeing the excellent photo of a
soaring immature S. isadori at page 79. As the authors
advise, "any sightings of Crested Eagle in W [or elsewhere where
S. isadori occurs] should be carefully documented and,
if possible, photographed."

Field Work Needed

What's Next

Field guides need to be designed to work as well on screen as Birds of Western Ecuador.
Hopefully authors and publishers will study the design and
borrow liberally. Without substantial reorganization, most
existing field guides will not adapt well to digitization.

Meanwhile, many
birders are scanning books in their libraries for reference
during trips. Scans of individual pages of a lengthy book are
not particularly user friendly, but they're the only way to take
most books along on a bird trip. In addition, useful
material available online needs to be downloaded in advance, since Internet
access away from the cities in many countries is often
nonexistent or slow. HBW Alive
is an essential reference, but you might not be able to access
it when you need it the most.

Kindle and pdf versions of books work well cross platform,
and modern software takes into account the need to allow the
user to place them on multiple devices. However, there are digital products that don't work cross platform and try to
prevent purchasers from using all their hardware. An example is
the digital
edition of Pizzey & Knight, Field Guide to the Birds of
Australia, 9th edition (2013). The digital edition is
available in Windows, Android, and IOS (Apple) versions, but it
is not cross-platform, and it forces you to accept 2-device only
licensing, which is absurd in 2016. I have a Windows desktop
computer, a chromebook, an iPad, and an Android smartphone. I
should only have to pay once for a digital version that will
work on all my hardware, like pdf or Kindle ebooks. Even if I
had an all-Windows lineup of devices, I could only use this
product on two of them!

Other Ecuador Resources

Birds of Passage - Ecuador - Great blog about a birding road
trip from California that got as far as northern Ecuador. It's
loaded with useful stakeouts and has me thinking about some
quick trips, such as a Bearded Wood-Partridge weekend twitch at
their spot in Veracruz. Unlike most extended bird trips, they
had a 4WD vehicle and were not constrained by the limitations of
public transport.

Miles
McMullan & Lelis Navarrete. Fieldbook of the Birds of
Ecuador. Fundación Jocotoco 2013. Out of print,
but available online at
Bookread - must disable Adblock Plus on the page &
register with Playster. You can read it for 30 days
free, after which you have to pay $10/month! Unclear
whether it can be downloaded for use after the 30 days
expire. The only copies in American libraries listed in
Worldcat are at
Columbia U. &
Stanford U., if you have access. Neither
participates in Inter-Library Loan.
US |
UK

Juan
Freile & Robin Restall. Birds of
Ecuador. Helm.
Forthcoming November 2016. No information yet whether a
digital edition will be available or which publisher
will have the American rights, if any.
US |
UK |
FR |
DE |
CA |
JP

July 3, 2016 - Digital recorder update

The
Stith Recording website reports that a
replacement for the Marantz PMD661MkII digital recorder is
forthcoming.

The
Nagra Seven digital recorder has been out for about two
years. With a humidity spec up to 99%, it would appear to be
ideal for use in the humid tropics. I haven't read any feedback
about it from bird recordists and would be interested in user
experiences. Stith are promoting it as part of their
high end bird recording package, together with the
Sennheiser MKH70, which I have been using for many years and
highly recommend. If you get this setup, you should order a
Sennheiser MZA14-P48U power supply
to avoid battery drain and a pigtail cable from the power supply
to recorder so that you can record the second channel at a lower
level.

I haven't moved to digital yet but may do so in the near
future. A major concern is the apparent difficulty of immediate
playback with a digital setup. Using the old Sony TCD5ProII
cassette deck with a Sony TCM-5000 on top of it, I can record a
bird, pop the cassette out of the ProII and into the TCM-5000,
insert another tape in the Pro II, and play back on the TCM-5000
while recording on the ProII to capture any sounds made during
playback. In two notable instances, Slender-billed
Scimitar-babbler and Sumatran Wren-babbler, the birds gave
amazing, explosive vocalizations during playback only that I was
unable to capture without the two-deck setup that I later
adopted on the advice of Davis Finch.

Perhaps a digital solution would be to use a recorder like
the Nagra Seven with a hot swapable microSD card along with a
playback device such as a
FiiO M3 or
X1 digital player that plays wav
files and has a microSD card slot, with a Radio Shack external
speaker.

First Guianas Field Guide Coming Soon (?)

Johan Ingels & Robin Restall. Birds of
Guianas. Helm. Forthcoming July 2017. No
information yet whether a digital edition will be
available or which publisher will have the American
rights, if any.
US |
UK |
FR |
DE |
CA |
JP